Restoring Exchange 2016 DAG from 3 week old backup

Question

Hello,

To make a long story short we have been working with Microsoft support for the last 3 weeks on an Exchange issue. This is related to the Microsoft Security update breaking ReFS which contained our database and log volumes. Appears that some of the databases have become corrupted and we are at the point where we will have to end up restoring the entire DAG running server 2012 R2 and Exchange 2016 server. In the last 3 weeks user accounts and mailboxes and been created. Our concern is if we were to restore the DAG from 3 weeks ago, what problems or issues should we be aware of at this point? Especially concerning the adding of these new users accounts and mailboxes and also Active Directory.

Thank you,

Steve

Answer 1

Ok, restoring the virtual guests from a snapshot:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/plan-and-deploy/virtualization?view=exchserver-2019

is not supported.

You have two options:

Rebuild the Exchange Servers using the recoverserver option:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/high-availability/disaster-recovery/recover-dag-member-servers?view=exchserver-2019

or building new mailbox servers , and them to the existing DAG and moving mailboxes (both PF and users) to them and if that isnt possible, restoring from an Exchange aware backup

I would choose the second option personally.

Answer 2

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. Really appreciate it!